Fathers' Roles Often Overlooked In Girls' Eating Disorders

Girls' Eating Disorders Are Linked To Relationships With Fathers,

Author Says

In the early '80s, when clinical psychologist Margo Maine was just starting to interview girls with eating disorders, she discovered an interesting oversight in the research.

Nowhere was there a mention of the role fathers play in the upbringing of the walking skeletons Maine was treating. And when the girls painstakingly pieced together how they went from being chubby, happy infants to emaciated shadows trying to starve themselves, they rarely mentioned Dad.

Or, if they mentioned Dad, he wasn't a distant ogre. Instead, he was inept at connecting with his daughter.

So Maine, author of the recently published "Father Hunger," (Gurze Books, $12.95), set out to correct that. Maine is program director of the eating-disorder service at Newington Children's Hospital. In her research, Maine found that most researchers pointed to the mother-daughter relationship as the culprit for young women who struggle with anorexia nervosa, bulimia and other eating disorders. Researchers believed that girls with eating disorders were suffering mostly from an unsatisfying relationship with an uncaring mother. Of the recorded instances of eating disorders, nine of 10 of those afflicted are girls and women. Maine said more men and boys probably have eating disorders than those statistics indicate, but they are not as likely to seek treatment.

The same mentality that distorts the number of men with eating disorders also excludes fathers from the picture, Maine said. She said fathers must be involved in the upbringing of their children -- even though society does not necessarily encourage that. Her intent is not to shift the blame for children's ills from mothers to fathers.

"People may now say, `Oh, fathers cause eating disorders,' " Maine said. "But that's not what I'm trying to say. We have excused fathers from our thinking about what helps children to grow up and what hurts them in the process. The only thing we hear about fathers is their absences."

The same oversight is present in the study of other behavioral anomalies, such as drug addiction.

When Adrienne Gorman, a Manhattan-based psychotherapist with a speciality in eating disorders, worked with addicts early in her career, she was surprised that few of her fellow therapists deemed it important that most of their clients grew up without fathers.

"I think it was very much the root of the problems," said Gorman, who is managing editor of the newsletter for the American Anorexia/Bulimia Association. "It was poverty, too, but mostly it was the absence of the father. Children need to have a father present. You need two parents, and you need to have fathers who care about their children appropriately."

And even when the research focuses more on the effect of a father's absence on a son -- rarely a daughter, Maine said.

In the past, mental health therapy focused on patients' relationships with their mothers, and most patients felt more comfortable talking about their mothers, rather than fathers.

"You have to feel somewhat secure in that relationship to criticize" or analyze, Maine said. "Young women who are still so needy of their fathers' attention and love" can't always discuss that relationship.

Overall, American culture makes it easier to be a good mother than a good father, Maine said. She calls fathers "second-class citizens" who are too often valued only for the economic stability they supply.

It was not always this way.

"Even in a hunter-gatherer society, the men went off and women were clearly in charge," Maine said. "Men respected that women would be able to take care of things. In a way, that worked better than what we do today."

Today, with shifts in roles, women who want men to share their power in the marketplace often are reluctant to share their power on the home front, Maine said.

"Women don't want to let men into the family now," she said. "That's where they have their power and control. It's hard for them to believe they can share that."

Movies like the remake of "Father of the Bride" illustrate the typical myth about fathers -- that if they are involved with their daughters' upbringing, it is because they want to hang onto their little girls. When that happens in real life, the support a father doesn't show for his daughter's maturation can easily lead to something like eating disorders. A situation such as that is called "psychobiological regression" of the young woman, Maine said. A young woman may try to starve herself and hold off physical maturation so she can at least continue to look like Daddy's little girl.

"Men often look to their daughters to take care of them," Maine said. "While the daughter may find that relationship somewhat satisfying, it is not a mutual relationship."

A father's lack of connectedness to his children also opens the door for a child to experiment with numbing agents such as drugs or alcohol, Maine said. To bridge that gap, Maine said, fathers have to learn to recognize and express their feelings.